On the day I got my first paycheck, I proposed that he and I take a walk to Chosun Hotel.

—A hotel? The two of us? Now?

—Not to sleep. Let’s go to a nice restaurant there. Have some steak, some pasta.

—I’m not sure if I can afford that.

—Don’t worry. My treat. To celebrate my new job.

He shook his head and said he didn’t really like eating meat. Which was total garbage, because we’d been to about a million barbecue places together by then. He insisted he liked barbecue but didn’t like steak. When I suggested pasta, he said we should get something like seafood stew instead. Or grilled clams, or seasoned crab.

—Jesus, hyung, do you like seafood that much? Were you a shark in a former life?

—It’s just too strange.

—What is?

—Two men eating pasta at a restaurant.

And that’s how our fight started.

—Do you think the world will split in two if two men happen to walk around together? What if, gasp, they were to even breathe the same air!

—While we’re on this subject, I think you try to touch me a little too much when we’re walking together.

—Oh, fuck off, no one is paying any attention to you on the street. Do you think you’re still student council president or something? Enough with the diva complex!

—Do you know how obviously gay you are?

And that’s how things got really nasty.

—Are you saying you’re ashamed of me?

—Yes, that’s right, I’m ashamed of you. You want to hold my hand in public, you call me baby. I mean, what would anyone think?

—Well, you know what, I’m ashamed of you, too, hyung. Your hideous, stupid trousers, your T-shirts with the stretched neck, your tattered backpack filled with all that crap—not even North Korean spies walk around in that kind of getup.

He stopped in the middle of the street. And for a while, he simply stood there. I simply stared at him standing there. Then, he turned his head and, without saying a word, walked away from me. Who does he think he is? I thought, and before I had the notion to go after him, he had already swiftly disappeared from view.

Had I made a mistake?

That was the first time I had seen him walk away from me.

Then, silence.

He stopped contacting me. No one picked up when I called. The phone indicated he had read my messages, but he never replied. This was the first time I had experienced such total and thorough radio silence from him. My lips dried out, and my heart seemed to shrink into itself with worry. I forgot about the rut we had fallen into. I again devoted every minute of my day to thinking about him: the first thing I thought when I opened my eyes in the morning was, Is he going to call today? and when I went to sleep with my phone under the pillow, all I dreamed of was him. There was only one question in my mind then.